Amazon to launch second "Secret" cloud region in 2025

Amazon announced its intent to launch a second "Secret" Cloud Region in 2025, designated as AWS Secret-West. This expansion significantly enhances Amazon Web Services' (AWS) capabilities for classified government missions and is poised to strengthen U.S. leadership in artificial intelligence (AI).

The new AWS Secret-West Region will be accredited to handle workloads up to the U.S. Secret classification level. The establishment of two such regions will allow defence and national security customers and their partners to implement multi-region architectures. This dual-region capability will provide even higher levels of resiliency and availability, which are crucial for their critical operations, and will further accelerate AI innovation within the classified sector.

Dave Levy, Vice President of Worldwide Public Sector at Amazon Web Services (AWS), emphasised the strategic importance of this development. "The launch of the AWS Secret-West Region will strengthen U.S. AI leadership and accelerate the development of advanced capabilities and groundbreaking innovation," Levy stated. He added that customers leveraging the new region will gain access to cutting-edge technologies from the world’s leading cloud provider, enhancing their critical missions through AWS’s inherent operational speed, scalability, security, and innovation.

Architected for mission resiliency and enhanced security

The AWS Secret-West Region is designed with mission resiliency as a core principle. It will enable the national security and defence community to deploy mission-critical workloads across two Secret Regions, each comprising multiple Availability Zones. This architecture allows customers to build highly resilient systems and store data closer to users, crucial for latency-sensitive applications. AWS confirmed that its classified Regions adhere to the same stringent standards for reliability, availability, and durability as all other AWS Regions.

Each AWS Region includes multiple Availability Zones, and the new AWS Secret-West Region represents a substantial advancement in this robust architecture. By utilising Availability Zones, customers can run latency-sensitive production applications and databases with greater resilience than a single data centre could provide. AWS supports synchronous data replication to a different Availability Zone within the same Region and asynchronous replication to a different Region, enabling customers to design applications for high availability across multiple Availability Zones and enhanced fault tolerance across multiple Regions.

Security remains AWS's paramount priority, with customers benefiting from data centres and network architectures specifically engineered to meet the demands of the most security-sensitive organisations. AWS was the first cloud provider to receive accreditation for supporting government workloads across all U.S. government data classifications: Unclassified, Secret, and Top Secret. This security-first approach is deemed essential as the national security and defence community continues to develop and deploy advanced AI solutions.

A history of commitment to government missions

AWS has a proven track record of supporting U.S. government needs, dating back to 2011 with the launch of AWS GovCloud (US-West), making it the first cloud provider to build infrastructure tailored for U.S. government security and compliance requirements. This was followed by the launch of its first Top Secret Region, AWS Top Secret-East, in 2014, which was the first air-gapped commercial cloud accredited for classified workloads. In 2017, the AWS Secret Region launched, solidifying AWS's position as the first cloud provider to support all U.S. government data classifications. In 2021, AWS announced its second Top Secret Region—AWS Top Secret-West. The forthcoming AWS Secret-West Region further expands this dedicated support for classified U.S. government workloads.